


On Tempests

by fancyday



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Developing Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Gen, John Watson Loves Sherlock Holmes, John and Mary Break Up, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Past Mary Morstan/John Watson, Sherlock Holmes Loves John Watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 14:46:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17184983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fancyday/pseuds/fancyday
Summary: 221B should have been empty, but here is John, physicality and ground to Sherlock’s ethereal painful floating, John looking up at him and Sherlock’s muscles aching. He’s been fighting, lately, and has not allowed for that in his eating and sleeping habits, and now his body is starting to refuse him, but still, John is here, where he should not have been, because he should have been with his fiancée.Oneshot. Eventual Johnlock.





	On Tempests

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tereomaori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tereomaori/gifts).



> Written as a Christmas present for tereomaori.  
> Enjoy!

**I**

Just what he needs, just right.

With the weakness in his fingers and his arms and the slight trembling, this is just right now. Hands on his elbows, pulling him in, and quiet music in the background, and a warm smell. 

He is dazed, confused, a slight headache setting in, pressure on his eyes, his throat starting to burn, heavy limbs, and what John is doing is good.

Outside there has been rain, and wind, and he does not like umbrellas anyway but tonight he could not have used one if he’d wanted to.

John seems as surprised as Sherlock that he’s here.

221B should have been empty, but here is John, physicality and ground to Sherlock’s ethereal painful floating, John looking up at him and Sherlock’s muscles aching. He’s been fighting, lately, and has not allowed for that in his eating and sleeping habits, and now his body is starting to refuse him, but still, John is here, where he should not have been, because he should have been with his fiancée. 

Sherlock’s shirt is loose and he can see his ribs whenever he undresses.

“Why are you here, John?” He will not trust this to deduction, and his eyes are clouding, and he needs to hear what happened, from John.

But John shakes his head, and peels the wet shirt off Sherlock, and shares the secret of the ribs, and throws his favourite reproach at Sherlock. 

“Christ, Sherlock.”

Sherlock makes a joke for John. “Christ, Sherlock, Einstein, Newton, Gandhi…”

But John will keep shaking his head, and Sherlock’s voice is rasping slightly, flaws in the molten gold. Sherlock shrugs, trying how movement feels in his shoulders, panther stretching. 

John’s hand is on his neck, where it sometimes is and where it has no business being, really, but Sherlock supposes it’s a way to make him look at John, when he avoids his sea eyes that sometimes see too much. Sherlock looks down, into the sea, and feels a drop run down his cheek, tear or rain he does not know, and he may be drowning in the sea. “I would fain die a dry death”, Sherlock quotes, and makes John frown. 

“Tempest”, Sherlock explains. 

“True enough,” says John, who sees the water gathering around Sherlock’s feet, and lets go of Sherlock, taking the warmth away, but returning with towels and blankets.

“Diolch”, says Sherlock, who feels like speaking Welsh. John just raises an eyebrow, and wipes away all the water, which is really a bit not good, because now there are tears, no denying it, but the sea, too, is overflowing, and it is Sherlock’s turn to touch, to try to comfort. 

“Tempest, John?”

“Argument.”

“It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken…” Sherlock offers, sitting on the sofa, tugging his legs up, lying down, until John looks satisfied.  
John sits next to him, tucking blankets around him, touching skin, too accidentally. He touches Sherlock’s cheek, lightly, with his thumb, and Sherlock’s body suddenly feels very tired but his mind has to stay awake, because John is swallowing hard, and his voice is a bit cracked when he says “Where’s that from, then?”

“Shakespeare. Sonnet 116.” Sherlock feels all this warmth hit him, making him sleepy, but still there’s John, crying and trying not to and looking at the floor, and until John can speak Sherlock will fill the silence for him, for a while. “It starts, _Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments._ ”

John looks up, bright eyes and a helplessness in them that makes it doubtful who came here more in need of the other. 

“What if they’re not true minds?”

Sherlock thinks for a moment, pursing his lips. “Well,” he says finally, “in that case I certainly see some impediments to the marriage.”

John makes a sound between laughing and crying, because only Sherlock could be so tactfully tactless, and thinks that he will make tea, and let Sherlock sleep, and that that will be enough for now. There will be new words in the morning, when he will have tried to sleep and Sherlock will have slept, deeply as he sometimes does, and some things will be realigned, reconfigured, and they will pick each other up, the way they do. 

 

**II**

When Sherlock wakes up on the sofa, John is still there, asleep in his armchair. Sherlock raises his head to look at him, and his head hurts, throbs. John is slumped in his chair, in his jumper, head turned slightly to the side, mouth open, breathing. Sherlock is happy that John managed to fall asleep. 

Normally, he can’t stand it when people fall asleep where others can see them; it’s gross, the sheer vulnerability of it, the little sounds and movements they don’t know they’re making. John is allowed to sleep, though.

Sherlock tries to blank out the deductions about John and Mary’s argument that force themselves into his mind. He wants to learn it all from John. For once, he wants the subjective truth, not what is real, but what is felt. 

Sherlock stretches, feeling into every inch of his body, becoming awake, becoming Sherlock. There’s rain outside. He needs a shower. 

He rises, quietly, quietly so John can keep sleeping in his armchair, and plods to the bathroom, with the blanket pulled around him like a toga. Like a bedsheet in Buckingham Palace. He turns the shower on and brushes his teeth while he looks for just the right temperature, the sweet spot. As opposed to the sore spot. Fiancée should not be an association to that, Sherlock chides himself. He lets the warm water run down his skin, closes his eyes and lets it run over his face as well, opens his eyes and sees transparent streams from a strange perspective before he has to close them again. 

He likes Mary. He likes John more. 

\---

When John wakes up in his armchair, Sherlock isn’t where he was when John fell asleep. John panics for a moment, but then he realises that he can hear the shower running. He smiles to himself because some things do not change and he can just picture Sherlock’s face when he realised that he hadn’t had a shower before sleeping. 

John doesn’t want to move. If he moves he will have committed to being awake, and he’s not sure that is an option today. He thinks of Mary, of the way she raised her eyebrows when they were talking yesterday. It was she who had first said the fatal sentence. They needed to talk, apparently. 

John forces himself to abandon this train of thought and thinks about Sherlock instead. He worries. His friend looks – bad. A bit like when John first met him, all the usual Sherlock problems on display: the thinness and the pallor and the tiredness around the eyes, and John suspects that Sherlock has started smoking again, which is bad. No hard drugs though. John checked, discreetly, he hopes, when Sherlock was already half asleep on the sofa, head on his elbow. 

The shower stops running and John snuggles deeper into his armchair, pulling a blanket around him. He actually slept a lot better than in the last few nights, which is crazy considering he hasn’t even been lying down properly.

Sherlock steps out of the shower, in pyjamas and the blue dressing gown, and John phones in sick. 

\---

Sherlock makes breakfast, for John, who looks tired, and older today. This is new, Sherlock being busy in the kitchen without noxious fumes rising, and John hovers around him, trying to find something to do. Sherlock makes him pancakes, but John makes the tea, because John makes the tea. They have their rituals. 

They sit at their kitchen table and have breakfast, it’s still dark outside and the rain has turned to sleet overnight which is now slowly turning to snow. Sherlock likes the wintery darkness. John praises the pancakes, claims he will never believe Sherlock can’t cook again and he will make Sherlock prepare their meals from now on, and then they realise they do not live together anymore, and they fall silent. John hides behind his newspaper for a bit and rustles the pages loudly. Sherlock stares into his tea, waiting, and when nothing happens he says, “John.”

John lowers his newspaper, folds it, looks at Sherlock. Maybe expectant, maybe fearful. 

“What happened?” says Sherlock.

John sighs, looks down at the table, then up into Sherlock’s eyes, then down again. “Mary told me to leave. Said we needed to talk.”

Sherlock cringes at the sheer conventionality of the sentence, then nods. “So you talked?”

“So we talked, and the outcome of the talk was that she thought I should move out.”

“Well, you’re always welcome in Baker Street,” says Sherlock. Like it’s not a big thing, like it does not mean the world to John, who is taking a deep breath and then a sip from his tea and then meets Sherlock’s eyes when he says thank you.

“The thing is,” John continues, “it doesn’t feel like she broke up with me. It feels like I broke up with her in my mind long ago, and she’s just the one who made it official.”

Sherlock rises, flinches because he’s still aching from the latest alley brawl in which there featured no ex-soldier with a gun to threaten people, and gets up to clear away their plates. 

“You okay?” asks John, concerned. 

“I’m fine. Go on.” Sherlock wants to give John some distraction, some noise in the background so he can talk.

“I feel… almost dishonest for not breaking up with her, you see? Like I was cheating on her or something.”

“Which you weren’t,” says Sherlock, from the sink.

“Which I wasn’t.” John frowns down into his tea. “Except she said my mind was always on someone else, and I should be honest with myself and with her and call it quits, and that if I wasn’t going to do it, she would do it for me.”

“And she’s right?”

“Jesus, Sherlock, she’s right almost as often as you are.

“And who is this someone else?”

John looks at Sherlock like he can’t believe him, torn between laughing and crying. How can Sherlock, who always knows everything, not see something as obvious as this? Something Mrs Hudson and Angelo and every hotel receptionist they’ve ever met knew from the first minute? “Christ,” says John.

There’s an obvious joke there, but Sherlock feels tense. For once, though, he genuinely does not know what’s coming, because for all his assurance and self-confidence he would never, in his wildest dreams, have let himself believe that he is capable of earning the regard, the love of someone so sincere and good and lovely as John. 

“You, Sherlock,” says John, and it is all Sherlock can do not to drop the plate he is washing. “Oh,” he says, the way he says it when he has just made a brilliant deduction. “Oh.”

 

**III**

They do not immediately act on what has now been, finally, said. John feels it is Sherlock’s move. Sherlock feels confused. He’s been silent for the better part of the day, playing the violin instead of talking. John can’t help trying to deduce what Sherlock is thinking from the music he is composing. John feels his confession in the air like an unanswered question, like Sherlock should answer it, but he does not know if Sherlock even plays by these rules.

Sherlock, for his part, knows it was a question. What he does not know is what to do with it, and so he plays, and waits for John to maybe go out and get some air, so Sherlock can finally think straight. 

John does not want to leave because he does not want to miss the moment when Sherlock finds his answer. So he waits, and drinks tea. He hopes this situation will be resolved soon, one way or another. He wants to take care of Sherlock, but he has manoeuvred himself into a situation in which every question or touch seems like a demand. Once he has an answer, any answer, maybe things can go back to some semblance of normality. 

Sherlock can feel the fever rising in his cheeks, and he wonders if this is the right time to think about all this. Possibly not. But at least he has enough data. Years of knowing John should put him in the perfect position to know his answer. Somehow, it doesn’t help. 

The truth is that Sherlock is afraid.

 

**IV**

When darkness falls again and Sherlock still has not said anything, John becomes desperate. Perhaps Sherlock is going to pretend that nothing happened? Has this, this emotion, romantic entanglement, already found its place in the waste paper basket of Sherlock’s mind palace? Outside, snow is falling, and inside, John is feeling cold. Sherlock has gone to his bedroom. John has no idea what he could be doing in there. John is trying to read, but he can’t seem to focus on his book. His tea has gone cold. He reads a paragraph and realises he hasn’t taken in a single word. 

And then Sherlock opens the door and comes out to stand before John, and John can read everything, everything in Sherlock’s eyes, but Sherlock says it for him anyway, and John thinks that nothing better has ever happened, to anyone, because here is Sherlock, before him in the mellow light and smelling of cigarette smoke and, finally, finally saying what John wanted to hear on their very first evening, and has wanted more every day since, his eyes serious in a way John has never seen them before. But when they touch Sherlock, cold, analytical Sherlock, is all warmth, fever and emotion combined, and to John, everything is light. 

 

 **V**  
Beautiful, beautiful, your piano playing. The notes fall like raindrops and twinkle like stars. I never knew you could play. But of course you can, just like you speak absolutely every language. We’ve travelled to obscure places, you and I, and always, always, there is that confident step forward in the hotel lobby and then the fluent conversation with the receptionist. You are a wonder, small wonder I could listen to you playing the piano forever. I watch your hands, see them move over the keys, now far apart, now close together, sometimes one over the other, so close.  
I admire your different personalities, and how you seem to have found a core of yourself, of selfness, that is unvarying, no matter if you are performing the ruthless detective or the elegant pianist at a posh party. Your eyes stray from the keys, a flash of blue in the serene atmosphere of the room, and they find me watching, as I am always watching you, even if I am not looking. 

_And there you are. My fingers do not need my eyes to follow them, the tune is in my hands and heart more than in my head, and it takes no time to find you, because you are always already there. Steady, calm, with an interesting twist in the way you hold your wine glass. I let my tune slow slightly, give myself more time to look, and what I am playing is sad, but what I am seeing is not. Or maybe it is. All true feeling has a sadness underneath._

You make me sad with your melancholy playing and the grave look in your eyes, and I wonder what you are thinking but I am not sure I’ll ever know, really, because this is you, after all, and there is no way I could fathom, probably. 

_Sometimes I think everyone just thinks I’m clever but I’m not. Somewhere in me I still believe that everyone could do what I do if they only tried, and it makes me feel like a fraud and it makes me angry at everyone for not trying. You assure me that everyone is trying, and that they really cannot think more deeply than they do. I believe you, but still I sometimes catch myself thinking that there is a button to press, a switch to flip that all those people cannot find, and that if they just could, the real world would appear, the curtain drawn aside like from a stage. I think I shall play something merrier._

Your eyes are strange, not just in their colour, spots of gold in the middle of the blue or grey, but in their depth and spark. Looking you in the eyes, when I know you are really, really listening to me, is thrilling on good days and intimidating on bad. Surely everyone who meets your eyes for the first time must be taken aback.  
Your tune has picked up in pace and volume and I see you look down at your hands and smile. You told me once the music tells you stories, that you follow the notes through a narrative that only you can read.  
I think the world only knows half of you, only what you choose to give them. You are more with me and less, a person more complete and less grand in the superficial sense, more fallible, warm, endearing, less cutting, less hard to reach and less callous.

_My mind is in the music and with you._

I do not believe what you choose to show the world is only protection. You like the agency of it, the teasing, the playing, the revealing only what you wish to reveal.

_My mind is in the music and with you, and as I look at you I think of how you give the world all of yourself, let everyone see what you think, like you are not afraid, openly warm towards everyone. To lay yourself so in the open you must be very sure of yourself. And you are, maybe not of your abilities, but sure of your sense of right and wrong, of what you will and will not do, and of what and who you choose to love.  
That you should love me is beyond me still._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not a native speaker, so please feel free to point out any mistakes.


End file.
